Yeah, those headlines. They are just too damn alluring to an exhausted parent with a short attention span.

After the birth of my first child, I got so scroll-happy, I began to question whether eating a conventional apple or buying a crib with the wrong varnish meant the end days were upon my family (and the human species), as I describe here.

So with my second, I tried to cut the clutter. It meant fewer Facebook groups, listicles and expert opinions. It was, though, a worthy sacrifice for the sake of being more present when it matters.

My guilty pleasure is podcasts. It’s information with intake that’s easy to control and access only when needed.

So every day when walking with my newborn, I turn up the headphone volume – or keep it silent. I listen while watching his shoulders, cocooned in cotton blankets, rise and fall to the rhythm of his breathing.

And with the push of a button, we are transported to fantastical places.

There we are on the crosstown Manhattan bus as a passenger spills dill pickles on her seat. Or we follow a Holocaust survivor into an Upper West Side Café where he tries to reinvent himself through endless conversation. We walk along with a man resolved to take down the Confederate flag. We brave the snowflakes on Christmas.

Or I listen to nothing at all, and just marvel as my son – so wondrous, tiny and near – as he scrunches his knobby nose in his sleep.

We walk until the rain begins to drizzle, until the dusk falls, until his giraffe pajamas get too tight, until he outgrows the nook of my arm and learns to speak defiant words and to crawl, walk, dash to distant cities of his own. But until then, we keep on walking together, and all I can do is be there, really be there, pretending this moment won’t ever end.